So I've been playing WAR all afternoon and one thing right off the bat I noticed is how much more of a resource hog the WAR client is compared with the WoW client. In fact it's on the order of twice as large as the WoW client, which I found very surprising. Especially since my poor HP Pavillion DV9000T (Windows Vista Premium Home edition 32 bit, 3GB ram) kept popping up memory allocation warning errors almost the entire time I was running WAR. I ended up shutting a lot of things down and turning off my side bar. That relieved the problem somewhat, but would still occasionally get the allocation error messages. My laptop actually has 4GB ram installed, but since I'm running the 32 bit version of Vista, I can't tap that extra GB. I'd hate to have to upgrade an operating system I really don't like all that much just to get to that extra GB of ram to play a game. Especially since I love WoW and it runs quite well on my laptop.
So anyway, I played all afternoon and hit level 5 before parking in whatever the name of the town is that starts chapter 2. I like the fact that most of the game controls are the same as in WoW, and generally like the other things I've seen in WAR that aren't in WoW yet. But there are a couple things right off that I'd like to see improved. Like reporting gold sellers that were spamming general chat the entire time I played. In WoW you simply right click on the individuals name, report the spam and it then throws that account on ignore. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything of the like in WAR and so I sat annoyed at the two or three accounts spamming their gold sales all day. The jury is still out on the chat channel and chat system. It seems remarkedly similar to WoW, yet different enough that I'm not sure if I liked it or not. I'll have to play around with it a bit more before I make up my mind.
Since I'm only level 5 and have only played one class thus far I certainly can't make any opinions about class balance, and about the game as a whole. I do sort of like the Swordmaster combat techniques though. Certain skills are only usable in succession to lower level skills through what the class terms "balances". Leads to a very linear form of combat whereas in WoW everything is more or less non-linear.
So day 1 down. I've much yet to learn and much left to write about.
